


Eternity Can Be A Curse

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Category: Wolverine (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Depression, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Logan Needs A Hug, Soul-Crushing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 09:58:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12528768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Unable to cope with the loss of so many important people in his life, Logan leaves the school behind and returns to the loneliness and desperation he'd lived before meeting the X-Men... only this time, he knows what he's lost, and every new sunrise is like another stab into his soul.





	Eternity Can Be A Curse

**Author's Note:**

> Set between X-3 and The Wolverine, based on a cut alternate ending where Logan is seen back in Canada in a bar and very obviously running from his problems again. Personally I wish they'd gone with that one, because it transitions much more smoothly into The Wolverine and makes a hell of a lot more sense. Also, major trigger warnings for depression, self-harm and multiple suicide attempts. Yeah, this is one of those.

 

Logan didn't want to remember anymore, and he'd never hated his healing factor as much as he did now. It meant he couldn't drink to forget like a normal man. It meant he couldn't live like a normal man. It meant he couldn't even die like a normal man...

...and god, he so wanted to die these days.

Fucking mutation. Fuck you, god or universe or whoever had made him this way.

The weather had been despicably pleasant on his ride over the border, mocking him. Life went on as it always had around him, as though the events of several weeks prior had never taken place. That made him want to stab someone. How dare it be so nice for most of the world, leaving only him to hurt as always. How dare he be made this way, to suffer for eternity with no way out. And so, maybe eight or nine days since he'd left New York, Logan had suddenly been gripped with the compulsion to test his healing factor in whatever ways he could think of.

He'd jumped out in front of a freight train. Pieces of him had been left messily all over for a surprising radius. He'd tried hanging himself with a chain in some abandoned industrial complex. Turns out even heat-hardened steel couldn't handle his weight. He'd deliberately climbed a utility pole and jammed his claws into the buzzing panel. Well, that had started a pretty impressive electrical fire.

But still, in those dark moments as his stupid body refused to let him give up, Logan could hear her in his mind, whispering things he could never remember when consciousness found him again.  _Please, please take me with you this time... I can't do this... please._ He always begged Jean to make it so that he could just go, but that was all he recalled from those spells of blackness. She never let him come with her, and he ached for it.

It wasn't completely because of Jean, though she was easily the vast majority of his pain. Logan had watched Charles die in front of him, and he couldn't stop it from happening. Angry though he'd been at learning about the telepath's manipulation of an innocent mind, the man had still done so much good. He'd certainly given it his best shot at helping Logan when anyone else would've just passed him off as a lost cause. Charles hadn't deserved to die like that. Or Marie, who Logan loved like a sister, hadn't liked herself enough to resist the temptation of the cure. No matter what he'd said about it being her choice, it hurt a little, knowing he couldn't have made it better for her. Even losing Scott had been hard. The guy had been a major pain in the ass, but after Alkali Lake they'd been sort-of getting along most of the time. Not friends by any means, but certainly no longer the bitter rivals they'd started as. Eventually they probably could've gotten to be friends, maybe.

But Jean...

Jean was more than those other reasons combined. Logan couldn't be sure what had made him fall so hard for her so quickly, but something had, and now he suffered for it every instant that he was awake. He'd been completely out of control when he'd first come to the mansion, an animal capable of speech with nothing worth salvaging that he knew of. First it had been pure, easily-understood lust, burning him from the inside out whenever he was near her. But she'd never been put off by him. Then, waking up in medical and under her care, some part of his mind gave. She made him want to be more than that out of control animal. She made him need to be better, to be redeemable. He'd stupidly even hoped he could someday look himself in the mirror and feel like a halfway-decent human being, a man again instead of a slavering beast.

Logan had lost that hope at Alkali Lake, when he hadn't even had much worth losing to begin with.

Finding her again - something had been wrong at the start, and that hope never came back, even seeing her waking under his hand in the infirmary. The turmoil and stress had put it off briefly, but after Alcatraz, everything had crashed down on Logan like a ceiling giving way to water damage in a rain of heavy wet plaster. He had nothing. He  _was_ nothing. And there was nothing for him, either. There probably never had been.

Weirdly, he'd begun thinking of all those famous love stories and shit, in between his almost daily gruesome failures at suicide. Romeo and Juliet? That one made him gag. Two stupid kids and a stupid communication failure, and oh no, they fucking died. Big fucking deal. Not like they even had much to contribute to the world. Brokeback Mountain? Okay, unaccepting culture and whatever. Well, culture  _still_ didn't accept mutants, and besides, that movie won a bunch of awards. Logan was pretty sure his life wouldn't get him any prizes except more hurt. Titanic? Oh god, Logan was sick to fucking death of hearing teenage girls squeal over that damn film. Everyone always said they cried at the ending of it, but he'd happened through the TV room once for the ending, and still didn't know what was so fucking tragic about the whole thing.

The only movie-love-story he had even the slightest respect for was actually  _The Terminator,_ because for one thing it was a good fucking movie and for another its horrible ending between Sarah and Kyle had been genuinely out of their control, the way things were in real life. He felt a strange little twinge of familiarity with that movie, actually, precisely because of his non-romance with Jean. The first time he remembered seeing  _The Terminator_ was late at night on some TV station while he'd still been forced to lay back and recover after the whole thing on Liberty Island. (At least he'd been allowed to stay in his room and not in medical.) Two days before, even, he would've probably made fun of the damn flick, too, because the idea of Sarah and Kyle getting such a connection in such a short encounter couldn't be anything besides laughable to him. But at the time he watched it, still feeling the wounds struggling to knit back together inside his chest, he believed it easily after waking up looking into Jean's caring smile.

If only some big metal robot would show up and tear  _him_ to pieces, now.

Every morning, especially after one of his attempts on his own life, Logan would wake up from his usual bouts of nightmares and want to puncture the fucking sun with his claws so that everything around him would stop being so god damn cheerful. The whole world seemed hell-bent, now more than ever before, on reminding him that everything was fine and dandy so long as you weren't a 6'3" mutant with metal bones. Life going on around him, oblivious to his suffering, was slowly ripping bloody pieces out of his soul. Sometimes it got so awful that he had a physical ache in his chest, and those were the times he'd pointlessly try to off himself again even knowing it wouldn't work.

Finally, one day, he just closed his eyes and let go of the handlebars.

Logan wasn't sure what he impacted exactly - one of those huge boulders, or a guard rail, or that 18-wheeler he'd seen in the oncoming lane - but it hurt like fuck for a good while. He came to, still whimpering after Jean in his mind, with the driver of the truck shaking his shoulder: "Hey, hey mister, you alright?"

Logan just mumbled something, not even sure what, and staggered to his feet. His motorcycle was now trashed, but other than that he'd accomplished nothing. So he gathered up his sad belongings and began walking aimlessly. There wasn't much, just a radio and some booze. A few pictures of Jean he'd swiped from Scott's room, which at the time had made him feel like the world's biggest prick, but now was only another inseparable layer of his overwhelming despair.

 _Please,_ Logan begged silently in the cold bleakness of his own head,  _please, somebody just let me die... even if I have to cut out my own fucking heart to do it. Please..._ His eyes stung, but he didn't actually cry. He hadn't since he'd cradled her limp form in his arms on that pile of debris. Maybe he couldn't, anymore.  _Whoever you are, out there, that likes watching me suffer... just end this. I'll do anything. Anything to end this fucking curse._

**Author's Note:**

> Logan thinks so hard about *The Terminator* because that's in my top 5 most favorite movies EVER. I love Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton in that movie, and fucking HATE *Terminator Genisys* for stomping all over the original. I pirated the movie online so I didn't even pay for it and I STILL wish I could've gotten a refund. Wow, this is totally off-topic from this story, sorry for the mini-rant :)
> 
> So yeah, I wrote this when I was feeling kind of down, and also because it's literally the only writing inspiration I've had in WEEKS now. Hopefully my ugly little writing hasn't ruined anyone's day.


End file.
